The Redeemer
by sparrowlately
Summary: Castiel comes around to the human way of thinking about time, and cannot discern an end. Tag to 8.02, "What's Up, Tiger Mommy?"


**Title**: The Redeemer  
**Rating**: PG-13  
**Spoilers**: through 8.02, "What's up, Tiger Mommy?"  
**Warnings**: Dean in general distress, space and time weirdness.

Time is funny and looped and long past bent up beyond repair, and angelic time is a thing removed from any other cosmic order anyways, and as such Castiel first heard the name Dean Winchester twice.

There was the moment in the spring of the year the humans called 2008 (Castiel might have called it maybe the year 13.7 billion, thereabouts, or maybe even four and a half billion, to be technical; had he been human he'd think to call it in 200,000s, or perhaps somewhere around 50,000, but he is not human and it doesn't matter much anyways)—something in the air writhed and split and on the orders of a faceless beloved brother Castiel dove into the pit to find the man they called Dean Winchester.

There was also, before, after, and simultaneously, the moment some twenty-five fleeting earth-years earlier (or later, or in that moment), when whispers began to circulate and the universe began to rumble with the unsettling news of a human child marked by something inhuman, an earthling boy with the blood and bones and sinew built the house abominations. It was, according to Hester, a foolish rumor.

"I wouldn't be so sure," Uriel had said without inflection. "I've hardly heard so much buzz since Bethlehem." And somewhere Castiel's brother Gabriel is crouched next to a shuddering wide-eyed girl of maybe fifteen, in a dusty dilapidated little town called Galilee, and somewhere a man called Sam Winchester is born and dead and prematurely crowned the boy king of Hell.

Somewhere, Anna is killing this boy, and not killing him, in the past and the future both, and there is a whisper of another son, older than Sam, and the name of that son is almost lost in the collapsing and extending and cyclical folds of history before Castiel or Michael or both lean forward and pluck it forth, and that name is Dean Winchester.

It's only once Castiel is familiar with the human understanding of time and history that this begins to seem muddled and hurt his head, and it's just one more thing that is difficult about the Winchesters, and like the rest he doesn't really seem to mind it. It seems simpler, to have things happen in an order, or that's what he thinks in the beginning.

In any case, a soldier or a child or an agent of history severs Sam Winchester's spinal cord and history cracks wide open, and it seems only an instant later Castiel is crashing his way through Hell when suddenly there is a moment of deathly stillness, total silence, the echoing emptiness of the air right before a tornado.

And then Hell shudders and splits and the righteous man is broken, and Castiel goes to get him anyways.

This is the moment when time becomes something Castiel can keep, and it seems a very long time later that he is crouched by a dirty riverbed in the heartland of Purgatory, a place that echoes and shudders with wrongness, in the air and the water and the dirt. There are monsters in the mountains and in the trees, devils languish in the valley and abominations feast on one another just past his line of sight. The Leviathan seethe as one being and call for his blood.

He senses Dean before he hears him, stills at the sound of trampling ground before he realizes he knows those footsteps, that gait. There is a flair of overpowering relief in his chest, brief and wild like a firecracker, and it dies immediately as he realizes what this means. And though time and experience are threatening to drown them both, merciless, Castiel cannot discern the end.

Somewhere, even now, the two men meant to end the world are staring at him with suspicion cut deep into their hard soldier faces, and his grand plans are crashing down around his ears, and Dean, this tiny little being who might have lived and died in the time it took Castiel to blink, this man he actually admires and loves and only wants to save, is looking at him with such desperate hurt that it all appears to have been for nothing at all. Somewhere at this moment a gentle and hopefully unforgotten soul called Lisa Braedon is coaxing Dean out of a nightmare, somewhere he is sitting in a bright warm kitchen and staring at his hands and forgetting where he is and dragging himself up into the living world to help Ben-not-Sam-never-Sam with his seventh grade algebra homework, and Cas is watching helplessly, a deep and cavernous yearning expanding in his chest and tearing him apart from the inside—and for what, he's still not sure. Somewhere the righteous man and the boy king are saving the world and Castiel is dead in pieces scattered in a field in middle America and in the dust that remains from the end of the world and the time before the universe existed, and somewhere Dean is beginning to trust him, and somewhere this strange and violent man with a heart like a lion or a star or a battering ram—somewhere this man is coming to eclipse everything an endless and beginningless existence has taught Castiel, and somehow the supreme and untouchable order of Heaven is beginning to shrink in the shadow of a man whose sole desire is to give of himself all. Somewhere, the seeds of rebellion are planted in Castiel's exploding heart, and somewhere he is letting his fury overtake him like it never has before, is beating Dean Winchester with his bare, base human fists like an animal, reduced to messy and overpowering fury because Dean who has somehow become everything does not seem to understand.

Somewhere, he is bursting into a warehouse with the intention of fulfilling a divine purpose, and somewhere he is laughing until his belly aches because of something strange and ridiculous and delightful Dean Winchester did. And somewhere he is slicing himself to ribbons, and killing his brothers, and searching for God, and wondering if this could possibly be the plan, and making a plan of his own. Somewhere the righteous man is stepping off the rack and tipping the balance of history, and Castiel is fighting all the more ferociously, another ten years or seconds to get to him, to find him, to lay his eyes for the first time upon this savior who had condemned them all.

Somewhere he is arriving, and finding a soul that is hot and twisting and warm—burning, even, with courage and with some twisted variation on faith (in a brother and a bottle and a car)—even as it is mangled and mutilated. Somewhere he is crouched in the darkness, half-feral, ignoring a fervent litany of prayer—_Cas please Cas if you're alive you have to be alive Cas we can get out I need to find you Cas where are you I'm lost please Cas please you came to get me last time please please please Cas I'm lost—_telling himself—as he always seems to be telling himself—that this is what is right and good and the thing that he must do for Dean, in whom he once, somehow, inspired faith. Somewhere Dean—his Dean, good and solid and choking on his own desperate love—is tearing tendons with his teeth in Hell, and Castiel is gripping him with both hands, as careful as he has ever been with anything, as sure, and pulling him from the Pit.

Dean is crashing through the forrest now, somewhere. Here.

"Cas!" he calls, delighted, the fool.


End file.
